If you work at the U.S. Department of Energy, your bosses want to know…how's your sex life?
The department now requires about 67,000 workers cleared to handle defense secrets to tell U.S. counterintelligence officers about romantic or sexual contacts with those from "countries thought to be developing nuclear weapons," according to multiple news sources.
Unless, believe it or not, we're talking about a one-night stand here.
Energy workers in that category are also now required to report friendships or professional relationships with foreign nationals if they spend "private time" together, even on the Internet.
The countries? All the former Soviet republics, the People's Republic of China, Israel, India, North Korea, Cuba, and Taiwan.
According to the departmental notice mandating reporting romantic and/or sexual relationships, high security workers do not have to report one-time sexual contact with anyone as long as that anyone is not prying for classified information - which Energy counterintelligence leader Ed Curran says is an old foreign intelligence agency trick.
"(That) is done on a daily basis today," he told the Albuquerque Journal. "There are many, many cases of this. The 50-, 60-year-old person stationed overseas for months, away from family and children, that person could be especially vulnerable to this kind of effort."
But before you start wondering whether the Energy Department is setting a peculiar precedent, similar policies are already in place at the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department, as well as, presumably, the White House.
ABC News says the Energy document has received wide circulation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it has become somewhat the butt of jokes. The lab has felt some of the heat over recent Congressional and Energy Department allegations of Chinese spying.
According to ABC, A scientist who provided a copy to the Los Alamos Monitor said: "Apparently, it's all right to sleep with someone - once - but if you buy a car from her, you have to report it."
